In a world in which every­one seems to be a chicken lit­tle speak­ing of the end of tra­di­tional jour­nal­ism, PR and adver­tis­ing, there are very few peo­ple who are work­ing toward guid­ing the indus­try toward suc­cess in new new media. Some inter­est­ing books about “what’s next” that I am read­ing are The Chaos Sce­nario by Bob Garfield and Free: The Future of a Rad­i­cal Price by Chris Ander­son. Add to this list David Henderson’s new book, Mak­ing News in the Dig­i­tal Era, a book that is part analy­sis, part brief­ing, and part pathfinder, explic­itly guid­ing read­ers through the very con­fus­ing social media landscape.

In the 170 pages of Mak­ing News in the Dig­i­tal Era, David E. Hen­der­son per­son­ally walks his read­ers safely through the mine field that is new com­mu­ni­ca­tions, dig­i­tal PR, and social media marketing. Essential reading.

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Here is the begin­ning of the chap­ter review series I will post over the next few months from my book, A Sur­vival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Opti­miza­tion. The book is doing very well, and I even have a cou­ple of 5-star reviews. A big “Thank you” to the con­trib­u­tors and read­ers of Socialmedia.biz for your support!

This book is meant to be a guide to build­ing an opti­mized foun­da­tion in the Social Web for begin­ners and advanced users alike. So, while some of the chap­ters may seem basic to many of you, they are essen­tial for those who are just start­ing out.

Chap­ter 1 of the book is about map­ping a social media and Web 2.0 opti­miza­tion strat­egy right out of the gate. A strong mes­sage through­out the entire book is to method­i­cally build a solid and opti­mized pres­ence in the Social Web that you can rea­son­ably man­age. Once that foun­da­tion is in place, adding and inte­grat­ing new tools will be almost painless.

The fol­low­ing excerpts are from A Sur­vival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Opti­miza­tion.

Chap­ter 1: Cre­at­ing your social media strategy

There are three gen­eral areas to keep in mind when plan­ning a strat­egy for opti­miz­ing your pres­ence in the Social Web: inter­ac­tiv­ity, shar­ing, and col­lab­o­ra­tion. Inter­ac­tiv­ity can come in the form of writ­ing blog posts, com­ment­ing on oth­ers’ posts, tweets, or par­tic­i­pat­ing in social net­work­ing com­mu­ni­ties. Shar­ing can be as easy as upload­ing images and video clips onto media com­mu­ni­ties. Col­lab­o­ra­tion can be achieved by con­tribut­ing to social book­mark­ing sites or wikis…

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Digi­tal PR exec­u­tives Sally Falkow and I will co-present a free webi­nar this Thurs­day on the sub­ject of dig­i­tal PR, social media mar­ket­ing and blog­ger rela­tions. This event is at 1 pm Eastern/ 10 am Pacific time, and you need to reg­is­ter in advance so please reg­is­ter now!

The name of the free dig­i­tal PR Webi­nar is How to Do Social Media Mar­ket­ing: Blog­gers, Social Net­works, Met­rics, and More.

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